Your gallery of 2D plots

[Jon]

To get your drones right takes 2 years.
If you don't have a load of good queens, this is one system:
1. start with a pure race queen and graft as many daughters as possible.
Don't worry about what they mate with as these are going to be your drone producers for the following season.
2. Requeen as many colonies in your area as possible.
3. Next season, get another pure race queen (not closely related to the previous one) and graft as many as possible.
These daughters will now be mating with pure race drones from the previous season queen's daughters.
You can takes things from there, requeening the most obviously hybridised colonies.

[drumgerry]

Many thanks for that Jon. So I'm not too far off in my Draw-wing technique then. Been reading this thread from scratch for the first time - it always seemed a bit daunting before now! - and read some good info from Roger Patterson on placing points 18 and 6 so hopefully I've got them a bit closer to where they should be now. The last plot above incorporates my adjustments since the first smaller sample.

Gavin - I'm hoping my 2013 queens will be good candidates for drone raising in 2014 and I'm hoping to source an unrelated queen in 2013 from whom I can raise my 2014 queens. With our new association I'm hoping to get samples from members bees and through co-operation maintain our genetic diversity. Where I am in Speyside apiaries are few and far between and there's usually a bloody great hill or ten in between!

Oh and sorry about the ruination of your ballerina Gavin!

[gavin]

All sounds good - and do check back over the page where I've hastily corrected myself!

[drumgerry]

That lady can do just about every scattering of points DrawWing can come up with!

Yes she is very.......flexible

[Jon]

Two from the ESBA apiary

ESBA1 and ESBA3

esba3.jpg esba1.jpg

[The Drone Ranger]

In another thread discussing the local bee populations with Prakel I said I would post some plots
I haven't chopped off 30 wings because I don't like killing bees (or anything) they are just illustrations of the spread between my own hives
One of them had to use the carnica version of Mophplot
N01carnicaplusNo1.JPGN010No.10.jpgNO2No2.jpgNO8No8.jpgNO9No9.jpg
The first is my hive No1 goodness knows that one is Carnica+ they are productive,gentle ,draw lovely wax,and healthy
No10 is very very fierce
No2 is black looking very gentle
No8 is the same but had some chalk at the start of season
No9 looks black is gentle ,brought in lots of honey, very good brood, no chalk so I chose this as one of my queen mothers
I think its fair to say the bees here are a mix of carniolan and AMM and their crosses
That doesn't inevitably lead to bad temper in in F1 F2 or any other generation
A very good and a very bad temper hive can have the same wing plots
I have to say Roger Patterson has done a fantastic job with Morphplot and its excellent instructions
Sadly it seems from the Horizon program on BBC we are now about to have more upheaval with injections of large numbers of NZ Italians
Those are lovely bees to handle but they have the wrong genetics for this part of Scotland
If I was in Devon I would be delighted to catch a swarm of these but not crossing with the already mixed population

[prakel]

Hi DroneRanger, do you have any historical plots going back a few years -I'm thinking along the lines of whether you're seeing a definite shift in genetics as a result of changing practices amongst larger operations in your area. If so, do you see any notable improvements (or the reverse) to your bees?

[The Drone Ranger]

I have a few slides lying around from earlier years but it's not been something I pay much attention to
My bees are much gentler now apart from some rogues who I try to eliminate

The plan is always to get snelgroves on before swarming preparations by the bees
During the rape crop queens are raised above the boards that allows some queen cell substitutions for temper health etc

Because of the early timing that would most likely pick up early drones ie Carniolan so perhaps not ideal

This year I have used apideas and grafting etc so the jury is out on how that will go
Some years ago using these methods I foolishly re-queened 18 out of 35 hives from one source queen
The chalkbrood fallout was a disaster so I returned to the Snelgrove/swap cells method where almost all queens are decendants of the previous mother
That was bad queen breeding I accept so its important not to focus on just wings
Again Peter Edwards Stud Book is an excellent tool to avoid these problems (which you are probably already using)
http://www.bibba.com/downloads.php
One of those plots doesn't have a single bee in the AMM range but another has 77%

[The Drone Ranger]

I haven't done any wing plotting since 2013
How are the bee breeders among us getting on
Gavin,Jon,Kate,Drumgerry etc I like to hear about it
I dont have any apideas in use just 15 keilers
That will be a splash in the ocean to you guys

[Jon]

I don't think I have done any since 2013 either.
Kate Thompson showed recently that there is just no correlation between wing pattern and DNA markers for Amm in hybridised populations.
Earlier work by Robin Moritz reached the same conclusion through checking different morphometric variables in the German Carnica bee populatiuon.
Wing pattern can pick out a hybrid colony ok but the idea that a colony with 80% Amm wing pattern likely has a better queen to breed from than a colony with say 60% Amm wing pattern is a false assumption.
Ruttner devised the technique to distinguish between pure race subspecies by wing pattern and it does that very well.
It does not work for 'concentrating' Amm genes by using it as a selection technique in a mixed race or hybrid population.
You end up with the wing pattern but don't carry the underlying genetics with it, ie it is a selection artifact.